Once More Into The Cyber, Part II

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, March 8, 1995

I AM TRYING to do my job; I am trying to intermediate. That is what the media are supposed to do; they are supposed to stand between the events and the audience. They are supposed to go to exotic locations and see what is happening there, and they are supposed to report fair and accurate impressions of what they have seen.

It is my contention that cyberspace is an exotic location that members of the media talk about frequently but rarely visit. It is my contention that because this is true, people who do not spend time in cyberspace have a very distorted idea of what it's like.

One method of intermediation is the creation of metaphor. There is a useful metaphor to describe cyberspace; ironically, it's been kicking around the Net forever, but I've never seen it anywhere else.

My suggestion, therefore, is that when you hear stories about hackers and pornography and theft and strange, dangerous games in cyberspace, replace the word "cyberspace" with the phrase "the interstate highway system."

That's what cyberspace resembles, more than anything else -- both are complicated networks of well-traveled roadways. No one "controls" the interstate highway system, although many agencies control portions of it. Therefore, anarchy could very well reign on the interstate highway system, and it would be a long time before the government could do anything about it.

But it doesn't. The ordinary civilized affection for the social contract does not disappear when you get behind the wheel of your car, any more than it disappears when you sit down at a keyboard.

And there are indeed places on the interstate highway system that are very scary -- I-80 in Elko at midnight, for instance -- but no one thinks that government regulation is called for. Mostly, nothing happens; cars go through and night turns into day and the birdies sing.

Same thing in cyberspace. Even when you're in weird and uncharted places, mostly night turns into day and the birdies sing.

EVEN MORE TO the point: The interstate highway system has been used to commit crimes. Pornography is carried on the system; bank robbers make swift getaways; there are abductions and carjackings and explosions. There are drunks and crazy people.

No one thinks this is an ideal situation; that's not the point. It's just that no one blames the interstate highway system. No one says, "You'd better keep your children away from the highways because you never know who's going to come down one of those off-ramps."

Any advance in transportation or communication is inevitably used for ill as well as good. That's life. The mistake is to blame the technology. The fault is in our souls, not in our modems.

There's even a place in the metaphor for hackers. The entire sport of stock-car racing is based on the advances that car hackers made in their machines in an effort to avoid law enforcement vehicles. The villains had the upper hand; they were too crafty to be caught. And yet, somehow, civilization survived.

THERE ARE PEOPLE who want you to be scared of cyberspace. There are people who want you to think of it as a bomb, as predator, rather than as a system of phone links. These people want you to be afraid because they have an agenda, which is the same old agenda, the agenda of control and repression.

Currently pending in Congress is the Communications Decency Act (S 314 and HR 1004), which basically makes telephone companies and online services liable for any illicit, obscene or inflammatory material that passes through their phone lines.

The various companies would for their own protection have to unleash an army of censors. A great citadel of free speech, of speculation and argument and playfulness and community, would be overrun by bureaucrats and spies.

Cyberspace is just another part of our culture; it deserves the same protections and the same freedoms.